All posts tagged Iraq

The Netherlands has historically been one of the world’s more welcoming nations for people seeking asylum. But the past decade of war in the Middle East – most significantly in Iraq – and turmoil in Africa have tested that commitment. The Council of Europe’s human rights commissioner on Friday, after a visit to the Netherlands, suggested the Dutch government isn’t living up to obligations to protect these people.

In recent years, the Netherlands has tightened its policy for asylum seekers, drawing criticism from refugee advocates. Read More »

Regular readers will know that there’s been no Belgian government since elections last June, with arguments over institutional reform and electoral districts leading to political paralysis in this small, frite-eating contradiction of a country. While Belgium snared the European record for longest negotiations months ago, easily smashing the Netherlands’ 1977 best of 208 days, the world record will take longer to beat… but how much?

Like all hotly debated questions of the modern age, the matter has a Facebook page. The argument hinges on how long it took Iraq to form a government after elections in March 2010, and whether you count the number of days to agree on a coalition, or the number of days for said government to start work. The work is different in Belgium and Iraq, of course: one is a country created by a treaty to act as a buffer state, riven by ethnic and religious divides, with a short coastline and surrounded by powerful neighbours, and the other is Iraq.

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The Wall Street Journal’s Brussels blog is produced by the Brussels bureau of The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires. The bureau has been headed since 2009 by Stephen Fidler, who was previously a correspondent and editor for the Financial Times and Reuters. Also posting regularly: Matthew Dalton, Viktoria Dendrinou, Tom Fairless, Naftali Bendavid, Laurence Norman, Gabriele Steinhauser and Valentina Pop.